Hilbert Curve-Encoded Rotation-Equivariant Oriented Object Detector with Locality-Preserving Spatial Mapping

Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection (AOOD) has found broad applications in embodied intelligence, autonomous driving, and satellite remote sensing. However, current AOOD frameworks face challenges in ineffective feature extraction and orientation regression inaccuracy. Inspired by Hilbert curve's intrinsic locality-preserving property, we propose a flexible \textbf{H}ilbert curve-\textbf{E}ncoded \textbf{R}otation-Equivariant \textbf{O}riented Object \textbf{Det}ector, termed \textbf{HERO-Det}. Our key innovations include: (i) a novel Hilbert curve traversal convolution paradigm with a dimensionality reduction scheme, which employs locality-preserving spatial filling curves for feature transformation, (ii) a Hilbert pyramid transformer enabling hierarchical construction of multi-scale feature sequences through space-folding operations, as well as (iii) an orientation-adaptive prediction head that decouples rotation-equivariant regression features from invariant classification cues to resolve orientation regression dilemmas in two-stage detectors. Extensive experiments show HERO-Det achieves state-of-the-art performance on AOOD benchmarks, with mAP of 79.56\%, 90.64\%, 90.10\%, and 80.47\% on DOTA, HRSC2016, SSDD, and HRSID, respectively. Consistent performance gains in cross-task validation further demonstrate the versatility of our method to diverse vision tasks, such as medical image segmentation and 3D object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/Qian-CV/HERO-Det.